BP Pushes Back Exploration Boundaries With Gulf of Mexico Find

By Fred Pals and Eduard Gismatullin (Bloomberg) — BP Plc’s “giant” oil discovery beneath the Gulf of Mexico shows the lengths producers are having to go to replace dwindling reserves because many of the world’s largest fields remain off-limits.

Restricted access to deposits in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela and advances in technology have spurred a shift toward harder-to-access reserves that would once have been unreachable. BP has pushed back the frontiers of exploration in North America in the past. It discovered Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay field, still the biggest oil field in the U.S., in 1969.